Word: chess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Which is fitting, because Gene Hackman paces through this film like a rush hour shadow, mustached and anonymous, sitting in his car playing magnetic chess, inconspicuous in a plain coat and tie. Hackman works wonders with a part like this: when he isn't cast as the big blustering shove-around of Popeye Doyle or Scarecrow, or squandered in a mistake like The Poseidon Adventure, he's our best interpreter of the middle-class presence: not the hero, or the anti-hero, but the unhero, making his own blind...
...amorphous atmosphere of Night Moves, Moseby's inability to finish anything off makes sense. It's night that's moving--an inexplicable rumbling in the distance, and Moseby's delusion is that he's moving a knight in a chess game, check, check, check. But in fact the checkerboard is a great swarm, with no one heading anywhere. Moseby hasn't got a chance of wrestling this free-for-all into the neat conformity he likes: once his blocks are set up, the whole construct just tumbles down again...
...Oklahoma wildcat oil prospector, Gardner learned early to separate wild claims from bedrock actualities. At the University of Chicago, he was known as a demon chess player who quit the game for a greater love: philosophy. "But somewhere, no matter how serious I was," he recalls, "there was always a little boy kicking around inside. Then I sold my first story to Esquire. It wrapped a plot around some shaggy dog stories. Red Skelton mentioned the piece on the air, and the boy and philosopher were off and running...
...ruling elite. Yet by the time he died last week at age 79 after a long illness, Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin had become an unperson in his homeland, an ignored and forgotten figure who in his last years idled away his time strolling along Moscow's boulevards and watching chess games in the park. Izvestia devoted only a paragraph to his obituary and no officials attended the perfunctory 30-minute funeral service...
...Fischer plays in 1975, chess lovers will surely be thankful; if he does not, the game will nevertheless survive -for reasons well expressed in a passage Cockburn quotes from Stefan Zweig's last story, The Royal Game: "Is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science too, a technique, an art, that sways among these categories as Mahomet's coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval, yet ever new; mechanical in operation, yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space...